Reinhold Messner did the impossible

It was October 16, 1986, when Reinhold Messner, then 42 years old, reached 8,516 meters of Lhotse-the fourth highest mountain on Earth-thus completing the ascent of all 14 eight-thousanders, or peaks above 8,000 meters, climbing them first in the world without the aid of oxygen and in complete autonomy.

I think it is unclear to many people the absolute value of Messner’s feat: to have thought, planned and achieved something that no one thought was possible. So impossible that to this day, after 35 years, only 39 mountaineers have managed to accomplish the same feat, make that three women.

These findings give us how little is still known about the relationship between difficulty and performance, especially when we want to examine the subjective perception of difficulty. “Impossible is nothing,” the motto of a multinational sports corporation, on the one hand is false because we will never be able to run as fast as a cheetah but nevertheless it is true that in sports it is said that records are made to be broken and to do so one must surpass that limit beyond which being human no one up to that point has gone.

Such was the case for Roger Bannister, who on May 6, 1954 was the first to accomplish a feat considered impossible by doctors and that was to run the English mile (1,609.23 meters) under 4 minutes (3′59″4). His record lasted just 46 days: the Australian John Landy took it to 3′58″, which was possible because Bannister had unhinged an insurmountable door beyond which all have passed, and he summed up his feat in these few words:

The secret is always that, the ability to pull out what you don’t have or what you don’t know you have.

The same was true for Reinhold Messner when, on August 20, 1980, he became the first man to accomplish another feat considered impossible by science, climbing Everest (8,848 meters) without the use of oxygen, and then going on to climb all 14 eight-thousanders with this approach. The experiences of these athletes seem to support the value of goal effectiveness, as a mediator between difficulty and performance and consisting of the personlea belief that one can achieve the set goal. So the choice of difficulty level will depend on how comfortable an athlete is with choosing moderate or high difficulty goals, and this will depend on how convinced he or she feels in the two conditions.